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Friday, March 23, 2007

Elvis Presley - 1960s film career

Presley admired the style of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Tony Curtis and returned from the military eager to make a career as a movie star. Although "he was definitely not the most talented actor around", he "became a film genre of his own." Pop film staples of the early sixties, such as the Presley musicals and the AIP beach movies were mainly produced for a teenage audience and called by film critics a "pantheon of bad taste". In the sixties, at Colonel Parker's command, Presley withdrew from concerts and television appearances, with the exception of a charity concert (Pearl Harbor, 1961) and a TV appearance with Frank Sinatra on NBC entitled "Welcome Home Elvis" where he sang "Witchcraft/Love Me Tender" with Sinatra. From then on it was full-time movies. "He blamed his fading popularity on his humdrum movies," Priscilla Presley recalled in her 1985 autobiography, Elvis and Me. "He loathed their stock plots and short shooting schedules. He could have demanded better, more substantial scripts, but he didn't." According to most critics, the scripts of the movies "were all the same, the songs progressively worse." The latter were "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll." For Blue Hawaii and its soundtrack LP, "fourteen songs were cut in just three days." Julie Parrish, starring in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, says that Presley hated such songs and that he "couldn't stop laughing while he was recording" one of them.

Although some film critics chastised these movies for their lack of depth, the fans turned out and they were enormously profitable. According to Jerry Hopkins's book, Elvis in Hawaii, Presley's "pretty-as-a-postcard movies" even "boosted the new state's (Hawaii) tourism. Some of his most enduring and popular songs came from those movies." Altogether, Presley had made 27 movies during the 1960s, "which had grossed about $130 million, and he had sold a hundred million records, which had made $150 million." Overall, he was one of the highest paid Hollywood actors during the 1960s; however, during the later sixties, "the Elvis Presley film was becoming passé. Young people were tuning in, dropping out and doing acid. Musical acts like the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, the Doors, Janis Joplin and many others were dominating the airwaves. Elvis Presley was not considered as cool as he once was."

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